Children's burial ground, Kilkilvery, Co. Galway
Co. Galway |
Burial Grounds
On a west-south-west-facing grassland slope in Kilkilvery, County Galway, there is a burial ground that leaves no mark on the land whatsoever.
No enclosing wall, no scatter of small stones, no depression in the turf. Its existence is carried entirely in local memory rather than in anything the eye can find.
The site is believed to have been a cillín, the term commonly used for an unofficial burial ground where unbaptised infants, and sometimes stillborn children, were interred outside the boundaries of consecrated ground. Catholic doctrine, as it was practised in Ireland for centuries, held that a child who died without baptism could not be buried in a parish churchyard alongside the faithful. Communities responded by quietly designating marginal places, field edges, old ringfort interiors, shorelines, and hillside slopes, where these children could be laid to rest. The practice was widespread across Ireland from the medieval period well into the twentieth century, and such sites are found in their hundreds throughout the country, many of them, like this one in Kilkilvery, surviving only in the knowledge of local people rather than in any physical form the ground has retained.